Product is an evolving idea, a moving target -- which is why it can be so confusing. Not just to people in news, but also to people in tech. If you want to understand, here's my story of how we got to today.

Shrink-wrap

Software used to come in shrink-wrapped boxes. Inside the box -- disks and a book. A registration card. The box sold to users for anywhere between $49 and $800.

There were print magazines. The magazines wrote about products, products ran ads. A full page ad cost up to $50K.

There were retailers, physical stores, where you could buy computers, and they also carried software. Eventually there would be software-only stores like Egghead. And there were primitive social networks called Compuserve, AOL, MCI Mail, AppleLink where people told stories about products they liked or didn't like. There weren't any ads on these networks.

There were software distributors, who the dealers bought software from, at a discount. Three big ones: Softsel, Ingram and Micro-D. Eventually the stores and distributors were replaced by mail order, and that, as far as I know, is where the shrink-wrap story ended.

Websites

Next came the web. Instead of products, we had websites. A whole new way to develop software. The software couldn't do much compared to what the desktop stuff did. Simple text editing, that was about it. Eventually the mainstays of the shrink-wrap world would show up as browser-based productivity apps like Google Docs. (I don't know how Office-type software sells these days? Do the users buy direct from the vendors?)

Snacks

Next transition -- apps and app stores. I think of these as snacks. All of them single-function little products, their entire UI must fit on a phone screen, not integrated with the others, creating little worlds (functionality-wise) with huge user bases, in the hundreds of millions in some cases. In the shrink-wrap days a successful product would have hundreds of thousands.

Productivity

Productivity "snacks" seem to be the next thing about to happen.

And probably after that, the users will want integration, where the data from one app can be used in another.

Which may lead to "snack suites."

Maybe that's why we're gravitating to larger-screen phones, to allow the software to get a little more complex. (That would be a good thing, imho, as a software developer.)

The unit of news

Briefly, it seems to me the unit used to be the edition -- an instance of the newspaper or news show for broadcast media, published once every 24 hours, that contained sections, and within sections stories.

Today the story stands alone, and is distributed as a unit by Twitter, Facebook, RSS and whatever else comes along.

Maybe a student of news could provide a rough timeline at how this evolved?